How serious is the Chinese challenge?

At the same time Beijing has reasserted old territorial claims over the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and backed up that stance with stationing new troops on India’s northeastern border.

China also seeks a larger role in South Asia. Beijing provided the Sri Lankan government with the arms it used to quell its long-running civil war with the Tamil Tigers. It has expanded naval operations in the Indian Ocean, while building civilian port facilities in a number of countries in the region - from Burma to Pakistan. It has deepened economic ties with Burma and Afghanistan, while ramping up its close strategic relationship with Pakistan by offering civilian nuclear assistance. It has excluded India from the East Asian diplomatic structures that Beijing champions.

China’s neighbours will be excused if they begin to worry about linkage of core national interest, national sovereignty and territorial integrity when coupled with growing Chinese defense spending. Beijing now spends 4.3 per cent of its GDP on defence, much more than its neighbours India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan or Vietnam.

But China also exercises newfound leverage through inaction. Beijing long resisted pressure to appreciate the renminbi. A June decision to stop pegging its currency to the US dollar has not yet led to meaningful increase in the renminbi’s value. China has also been notably unwilling to exert pressure on North Korea over its recent alleged sinking of a South Korean naval vessel. And Beijing insisted on watering down UN economic sanctions against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program before it would vote for them, suggesting China’s economic interests in Iran trump European and US strategic concerns about the program.

Beijing is clearly signaling that the international status quo is not permanently acceptable to China. It has laid down a set of markers, and its relations with other countries have changed forever.

Yet many times in the past the Chinese have tested the boundaries of their influence and the patience of the West and its Asian neighbours, only to pull back. If all the posturing that has happened to date proves to be the extent of China’s acting out, the situation is manageable.

The danger of increased international tension and miscalculation will come only if Chinese assertiveness grows in the months ahead.

Are there other regions or issues that China will define as its “core national interest” and thus off limits to foreign criticism? Its domestic human-rights policy? Its carbon-emissions record? Territorial claims in central Asia?

Will Chinese companies attempt to circumvent Iranian economic sanctions, tempting Germans, Koreans or the Japanese to follow suit?

Will Beijing use its massive holdings of US treasury notes to leverage more directly American behaviour?

It’s unrealistic to expect an economically successful, increasingly self-confident China not to play a more expansive role in the world. But that reality does not give Beijing license to throw its weight around with impunity, even if other nations have done so in the past.

Europe, America and the rest of Asia must be vigilant. China is rising. And rising powers have a history of upsetting the status quo.